Icebreaker Krasin

The icebreaker Krasin, launched under the name Svyatogor, is now permanently moored in St Petersburg as a branch of the Kaliningrad-based World Ocean Museum. The vessel was built in 1916–1917 at Armstrong's shipyard in Newcastle, England, on commission from the naval department, which spent more than four million roubles on the order. The design developed the concept of the icebreaker Yermak, but with a strengthened engine of around ten thousand horsepower; the future writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, then serving as a ship's engineer, took part in its construction. In the autumn of 1917 the St Andrew's naval ensign was raised over the ship, and it was assigned to the Arctic flotilla.

In the summer of 1918, in order to block the path of British interventionist forces to Arkhangelsk, the ship was deliberately scuttled at the mouth of the Northern Dvina; some of the sailors involved were later shot. The interventionists raised the vessel and took it away to Britain, where it was used to clear mines from the waters off Scapa Flow. In 1922 the engineer Alexei Krylov and the trade representative Leonid Krasin helped the Soviet government buy the icebreaker back; five years later the ship was named in Krasin's honour.

The Krasin achieved worldwide fame in 1928: after the crash of the airship Italia in the Arctic, of all the vessels sent to help, only this icebreaker managed to reach the ice camp where the surviving companions of General Nobile were stranded, and took them aboard; on its way back it also rescued the German liner Monte Cervantes, which had been holed by an ice floe and had around one and a half thousand people on board. For this rescue operation the crew were awarded one of the Soviet Union's highest labour honours. The outbreak of war found the ship off the country's eastern shores, and it had to sail through two oceans and the Panama isthmus to reach the Arctic shipping lanes; in 1942 it was armed three times over — first with American and British guns, then with reinforced Soviet artillery — and during one of the northern convoys its anti-aircraft gunners shot down an enemy aircraft.

After the victory the ship continued its Arctic service, underwent a major overhaul in East Germany in the late 1950s that changed the appearance of its superstructure, and from 1972 was converted into a floating power station for geologists prospecting for oil and gas in the northern seas. By 1989 the upkeep of the decommissioned icebreaker had become an unbearable burden, and after lengthy negotiations the ship was transferred to the balance sheet of the public International Fund for the History of Science, and later to the Tekhimeks enterprise; this is how the future museum ship was saved from being scrapped for metal. The vessel was granted the status of a historical monument in 1991–1992. In the autumn of 2014 it was repaired in Kronstadt: its hull was cleaned and repainted, and its valves, propeller and rudder were put back in order.